Team Member

Dr. Tina Park
NAADSN Fellow
Dr. Tina J. Park is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of The Park Group (TPG).
As one of Canada’s top experts on Korea and the Asia-Pacific region, she serves as a voice of authority on Northeast Asia, Canadian foreign policy and NATO in the media. To date, she has conducted some 500 live and pre-taped media interviews for various television, radio and print new media around the world, such as CBC News channel, the National, CBC Radio, CPAC, TVO, LBC, LPR, CTV News, Global News, CP24, BBC, Al Jazeera & CNN. Some of her media interviews can be found here. She is also an active contributor to Canada’s print outlets, such as Globe and Mail, OpenCanada.org, and Maclean’s.
Since 2010, Dr. Park has also served as a Co-Founder & Executive Director of the Canadian Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, based at the University of Toronto. The CCR2P is a non-profit, non-partisan research organization aimed at advancing scholarly engagement and political implementation of the R2P principle. To date, Dr. Park has advised over 30 governments and regional organizations on their policies with regards to R2P and human rights, including the Inter-Parliamentary Union, NATO, the European Union and the InterAction Council, and has addressed the UN General Assembly’s annual dialogue on R2P at the United Nations Headquarters in New York since 2013. She also contributed to the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon’s annual report on R2P since 2012. She remains as a passionate advocate of human dignity and equality and has travelled to some 90 countries to promote global humanitarianism. Dr. Park is co-author a several book chapters on R2P, including The Role of Business in the Responsibility to Protect (Cambridge University Press, 2016), and R2P and Cyber Space: Sovereignty as Responsibility (NATO CCD COE, 2020) along with numerous articles.
An award-winning scholar, her Ph.D. research at the University of Toronto focused on a century of bilateral relations between Canada and Korea under the broader history of globalization in the 20th century. Her thesis, which employs cross-disciplinary methodology to study the evolving relationship has been recognized as one of the most definitive scholarly works on the history of Canadian-Korean relations, drawing on interviews and archival records from both countries. From 2010 to 2017, Dr. Park taught undergraduate students at the University of Toronto and Ryerson University on Canadian foreign policy, Asian-Canadian history and the history of espionage and intelligence. She was also designated as the country expert for Korea at the Centre for Intercultural Learning at Global Affairs Canada (GAC) and has trained high-ranking members of the Canadian Armed Forces in Kingston, in addition to advising the North Korea Task Force and the former Assistant Deputy Minister of the Asia-Pacific Region at GAC. Dr. Park is currently working on a manuscript on the Korean Peace Process, focusing on prospects for denuclearization on the Korean peninsula, to be published in 2021 with the University of Toronto Press. She remains actively engaged with policy discussions on Canadian-Korean relations through the Canada Korea Forum, the Canada-Korea Dialogue on the Hill, and the annual Korea symposium hosted by GAC and the Embassy of the ROK in Ottawa.
Dr. Park is an enthusiastic champion of gender equality and female representation in federal politics in Canada. She co-founded the U of T Women in House program with the Hon. Carolyn Bennett, the Minister for Indigenous and Northern Affairs in 2013. To date, this innovative program has taken some 1,000 bright, young female students from U of T to shadow an MP or a Senator for a day on Parliament Hill in Ottawa and to engage in an intimate Q&A session with a Supreme Court Justice at the Supreme Court of Canada, in addition to a special Q&A with Governor-General Julie Payette in Rideau Hall and a networking reception featuring cabinet ministers, parliamentarians and civil servants.
- Annotated Bibliography: China and the Arctic: Literature Review, by Tina Park, May 2021
- Annotated Bibliography: Understanding Japan’s Interests in the Arctic Region: a literature review, by Britney Best and Tina J. Park, April 2021
- Policy Primer: The Republic of Korea’s Interests and Priorities in the Arctic, Tina J. Park, March 2021